IGN - Is Metacritic Ruining The Games Industry?It also leads to some very dodgy behaviour from the publisher side of things. Iíve been told stories of PR executives working on particular games being directed to specifically target these smaller sites in the hope of raising that average score and covering up a less enthusiastic reception from the big outlets. For most people working in games marketing, Metacritic will come up during their annual review process, and a less-than-ideal average score for a game will sometimes result in a severe bollocking.

Erm...what? Who said anything about people not playing the game? Reviews by definiton are written by people who have had hands-on game time. A cursory glance at any review will tell you if that is the case. Cant you answer a simple question?

Say that a game, lets call it GameAAA was released with almost universal acclaim by profesional reviewers, but a significant percentage of user reviews (lets say 30% for argument's sake) gave it very negative reviews 0/10 or even 1/10.

Would you really ignore their reviews, would you still buy the game without even reading some of those scalding reviews??

Your first sentence is idiotic. How you can possibly construe that as "corporate culture bullshit"... christ it's a stupid thing to say.

Do you know what game is worth 0s? Big Rig Racing. Do you know what game is not worth 0s? Virtually every other game.

I'm sorry if feeling that someone should have either paid for a game or played a game before rating it makes me a "corporate culture bullshit[er]." Disagreeing probably makes you kind of stupid.

You really think a review is valid if it comes from someone that has not played it? That's as moronic as the idiots sending death threats to critics that said Dark Knight Rises is "just ok," despite the kid at home also having not seen it.

Anyone that gave Diablo 3 a 0 without having played it or purchased it is a fanboy, plain and simple. This goes for the morons giving it a 10, too. Oh, wait, I can't say that, it goes against your idiotic view of me. I'll fix it. "Every game should be rated by overly passionate idiots before they play it, meaning every game should be swarmed with 0s or 10s by people that are too stupid to understand that not everything is exactly what they wanted."

If Deus Ex: HR hadn't been leaked its Metacritic user score would have been all 0s, too, by morons that felt it was too shiny and too yellow and too Press-X-To-Win and too highlighting-ladders-to-be-too-easy. Stupid "fans" fans either freak out because it's different and give it 0s without playing it, and other stupid fans drool and give it 10s without playing it due to the name. Neither is a valid opinion.

Say that a game, lets call it GameAAA was released with almost universal acclaim by profesional reviewers, but a significant percentage of user reviews (lets say 30% for argument's sake) gave it very negative reviews 0/10 or even 1/10.

Would you really ignore their reviews, would you still buy the game without even reading some of those scalding reviews??

Talk about "shills" all you want, but Diablo 3 was hit by the reverse. The game had hundreds of 0 reviews before it was launched. Any big game will. Why? Because a bunch of people are complete idiots and love going in and giving 0 to things they haven't played. Their opinion should not be treated as valid.And, with Diablo 3, a ton also went in and gave it an immediate 0 before actually playing it because the servers were down. Great, that's a valid complaint, but they still rated it without playing it, were likely playing the crap out of it a week later, some are probably still playing it today, and they won't rerate it because they think Blizzard is some giant asshole who deserves to be spit on (but hang on, mom, I can't go to sleep until I find a new sword!)

I haven't played it, but I guarantee Diablo 3 is in no way a 0 out of 10 game. Anyone rating it a 0 out of 10 is a shill, just not a corporate shill.

Similarly, hundreds of people rated it a 10 before playing it. They also deserve to be completely ignored. They're not "regular customers," they're idiots.

For those of you who are taking a huge fucking shit on the opinions of regular customers, gamers like yourself:

What the fuck is the difference between a score of 0/10, or a score of 4/10??????

Tell me please if a game had 44% average score, would you really consider buying it???

What about 56%????

Dissmising 0 scores arbitrarily is absurdly stupid. If more than a hundred people give a 0/10 or a 1/5 or whatever, doesnt that warrant a further inspection of the material at hand? Dont you go "Hmmm, hey a shitload of people really hate this game, maybe it isnt so great as PC Gamer makes it out to be...."

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, if someone wants to give Diablo3 a 0 because they are unhappy with the game, then by all means that is their perogative and their opinion!!!

Had I known what a turd Diablo3 is at the moment I wouldnt have jumped on the bandwagon and preordered. BUt now thanks to sites like metacritic, people dont have to read shill rave reviews and can read a few real reviews with some real opinions.

Metacritic is useful in the same way that Market Spend is useful, Pre-Order Sales is useful and Actual Sales is useful. They give the publisher/developer some standard tools and metrics to gauge the success or failure of their product in a logically consistent way.

The problem is when the the publisher/developer/consumer any one metric (or even all of them) to be the "END ALL BE ALL" metric that has everything to do with a game's success. Making Metacritic a line item in contract payout and bonuses is about as dumb as you can get. Especially once you consider how Metacritic converts certain scores or a reviews site's bias.

Darks wrote on Jul 18, 2012, 15:42:Really Creston, so youíre telling me that when a user goes in there and totally bombs a score to Zero, thatís a justified score because the user is being a jerk and purposely bombing the score because they didnít like the game? Like Verno said, games a subjective to the persons interest and like. When someone purposely goes in and gives a game a zero that cannot be taken seriously by anyone.

Nobody cares about the user scores. There's no telling if those people even played the game they're reviewing. The article and most people are talking about the aggregate on the professional reviews.

NiteX wrote on Jul 18, 2012, 18:11:You're not a cool kid unless you hate IGN! Or SWTOR for that matter!

Letís say thereís a new film out in a few weeks that was filmed under the following unusual contractual condition: if the Rotten Tomatoes rating isnít above 80% after a week or two, the writer and director donít get paid royalties. Or say a new band signs to a record label, and the label refuses to pay a signing bonus unless their first album gets 5 stars in NME, the Guardian and Kerrang as well as an 85+ on Pitchfork.

Do you know why this doesn't happen? Because people in those industries aren't suckers.

I think it has more to do with the age of the industries. The games industry, as we know it today, is relatively young compared to the movie or music industries. Given more time developers will start to wise up and stop putting up with publisher's bullshit metrics.

Letís say thereís a new film out in a few weeks that was filmed under the following unusual contractual condition: if the Rotten Tomatoes rating isnít above 80% after a week or two, the writer and director donít get paid royalties. Or say a new band signs to a record label, and the label refuses to pay a signing bonus unless their first album gets 5 stars in NME, the Guardian and Kerrang as well as an 85+ on Pitchfork.

Do you know why this doesn't happen? Because people in those industries aren't suckers.

Creston wrote on Jul 18, 2012, 12:18:The sheer GALL of IGN to question Metacritic is fucking astounding. The existence of metacritic isn't ruining the game industry, IGN, it's fucking shitholes like your own websites that will sell review scores for more advertising dollars.

Creston

Really Creston, so youíre telling me that when a user goes in there and totally bombs a score to Zero, thatís a justified score because the user is being a jerk and purposely bombing the score because they didnít like the game? Like Verno said, games a subjective to the persons interest and like. When someone purposely goes in and gives a game a zero that cannot be taken seriously by anyone.

First off, I never, ever read or listen to any metacritic scores. I could care less about them. I always go off of what I know about games and the publisher and the game play videos I watch or comments from my friends. Anyone who makes a purchase solely from metacritic or any other reviewer is a fool.

Prez wrote on Jul 18, 2012, 12:39:One thing I've noticed is that when I play a "bad" game while I'm online in Steam (meaning anyone can see what I'm playing), I'll get messages from some of my Steam friends to the order of "Why are you playing that turd?!?" Everyone says they understand that entertainment is very subjective thing but in truth I can't help but feel that we try to project our thoughts and impressions onto others when it comes to what we think is "bad". I plan on playing the new DNF dlc I just bought offline for that reason. ;)

If it's a game I'm interested in and I see someone playing it I'll often ask them what they think of it, though I'd never go as far as to tell them that a particular game is crap. In that respect I really like Steam because there is a community feel to it. I just wish that the desktop client logged previous chats like the mobile client does and like most modern chat clients do (even Facebook does).

Prez wrote on Jul 18, 2012, 13:48:Hatred of The Old Republic is irrational? I thought it was terrible. Absolutely, utterly terrible. And I can list at least two dozen reasons why, which makes it not so irrational in my book.

It was pretty bad, but was it so bad that it warranted going to Metacritic and purposely bombing it with 0 score reviews? Is any game that bad for that matter? That's the irrational part.

The only way Metacritic could combat that is to have some way to verify that the user owns the game, but there's no easy way to do that for a 3rd party website.

I would have rated it around 4, and then only that high because it was stable and had good voice work.

ďThe greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.Ē - Mahatma Gandhi